The Pragmatic Programmer

by Andy Hunt

it is up to you to provide solutions, not excuses.

Suppose you decide, early in the project, to use a relational database from vendor A. Much later, during performance testing, you discover that the database is simply too slow, but that the object database from vendor B is faster. With most conventional projects, you'd be out of luck. Most of the time, calls to third-party products are entangled throughout the code.

All on Automatic We were once at a client site where all the developers were using the same IDE. Their system administrator gave each developer a set of instructions on installing add-on packages to the IDE. These instructions filled many pages—pages full of click here, scroll there, drag this, double-click that, and do it again. Not surprisingly, every developer's machine was loaded slightly differently. Subtle differences in the application's behavior occurred when different developers ran the same code. Bugs would appear on one machine but not on others.